Impossible CAPTCHA : It Doesn’t Really Matter if You are Human or Not

CAPTCHA is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Human Apart”. In a broader sense, CAPTCHA is defined as:

Type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer. The process involves one computer (a server) asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade…

[“simple” is the key word here]

CAPTCHAs present a very controversial topic: you can’t do without them as a webmaster and you can’t stand them as a user.

Some CAPTCHAs are just impossible to figure – no matter who you are (a robot or a human), you won’t pass the test. Here’s my gallery of impossible CAPTCHAs:

Hysterical! Thanks so much for finding these. Given our line of work, I’m always collecting funny and impossible CAPTCHAs. The Matrix stream and 3D terrain are among my new favorites!

You’re also right that it doesn’t matter if it’s a human or bot doing the submitting, but not necessarily because the puzzles are too complex. In the past few years spammers and hackers have started hiring teams of workers to submit spam/abuse to Web forms for pennies (even for forms that don’t use any kind of CATPCHA).

So true…I recently was requesting service from a website and I could not get the captcha to work. After leaving with a serious ding to my self esteem (turns out I’m not human). I emailed them. Never heard a response, guess I will go with someone else.

i lived a very bad day because the first captcha you mentioned (that one of the cats) .it used on rapidshare i have to download a very important file to complete my research. and my supervisors keep asking about the results and i spend the whole day tring to solve this captcha with no hope until i called the lap in the uk to send me another copy of the file
if i can catch the developer who developed this captcha i would kill him.lol

You know what’s interesting? Captcha is designed to not be passable by a computer (hence how it tests your human-ness) and yet the computer must know the answer as it is the very thing that is assessing your Captcha test. In case you’re curious I wrote a post about the philosophy of Captcha here http://endofthegame.net/2011/10/03/humans-and-computers-are-you-a-bot/
Let me know what you think!

My problem is that when it is straightforward to copy, the app itself malfunctions, too often. Reading it correctly can be one challenge.
But when the combination of Arabic numerals and Capital letters is plain and unadorned and multiple tries still don’t work, it’s a common malfunction of a badly coded app.
I tried last night to Contact Us to let them know that Captcha wasn’t working on their Site. Captcha blocked my letter of complaint about it.

An impossible captcha proves to me the site only cares more about it’s few loyal readers then it does of capturing new audiences.

I give the friendly back arrow a hard click and make a note of myself never to visit any blog that is hosted by that site.

For example Soft Pedia has an impossible captcha asking you to solve an equation but then there is another number that has nothing attached to it that I don’t know what it’s there for unless I am not seeing something.

I have entered Microsoft’s captcha enough times to circle the earth. It seems case sensitive, then not, so I give the audio a try-again, apparently I am hard of hearing-not-or amazingly dense-again, not.
My question is how to determine what M. is after. Case sensitive? Random? Good luck?
Or Good riddance!
Many thanks,
Laurel